Remembering Bert McKinnon – NAVMC co-founder

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Bert McKinnon was one of the founders of Northern Arizona Volunteer Medical Corp (NAVMC).  He travelled with surgical teams to Armenia and Brazil, where he faced the challenges of providing surgical care with limited resources.  He provided the highest quality of orthopedic care to his patients in Northern Arizona and was a major influence in […]

Hope Everywhere

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The lead-up to this trip has been rough. Haiti has been experiencing escalating conflict for many months, and the decision to proceed with our trip was constantly in question. Many members of our team decided to stay home out of legitimate concerns for safety. Flights were delayed. Bull was hacking up a lung…then Crystal, then […]

A Gown for Tuba

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  On a chilly pre-dawn morning, Molly Brown pulled into Dr. John “Bull” Durham’s Flagstaff driveway and started to load her truck with six-foot-long rolls of blue fabric. Brown the executive director of the Northern Arizona Volunteer Medical Corps, would normally be at Durham’s garage checking on medical supplies for one of the two trips […]

Day 5 in Haiti

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  The NAVMC team landed in Port-au-Prince 5 days ago, and it has been non-stop since. From day one, this trip has been different. In recent weeks, President Jovenal Moïse has been implicated in two government audits on the misuse of billions of dollars in Venezuelan aid meant to help the country’s poor.  Thousands of […]

Paging Doctor Bull

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By Kevin Charles Fleming ’09 Photographs by Mark Lipczynski, Illustrations by Yann Kebbi MAY 14, 2019   WHEN DR. JOHN “BULL” DURHAM ’80 MET WOODJINA IN A STIFLING, crowded ward of Port-au-Prince’s La Paix Hospital, the five-year-old girl was dying. For weeks, she’d been confined to a dirty mattress, unable to walk, beset by a spiking […]

December 2018 – Trip Summary

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Molhenne was supposed to die.  When our medical team left Haiti in December 2017, her blood count was insufficient to sustain life especially in someone who had just lost both of her legs.  She has been HIV positive since birth and medications had kept the virus at bay.  At 17 years old she presented to […]